Brisbane River Anti-Memoir

By Martin Knox

This story is the anti-memoir of Chance,

an immigrant to Australia from the UK, who has an affinity for water and lives by the Logan and then the Brisbane rivers, where he is a victim of monstrous river flooding and desiccating droughts.

Wanting protection, he fi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Novel Ideas
• Release date: Sep 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9780648993070

Martin Knox

Martin Knox grew up on a farm in Somerset England. He graduated as a chemical engineer from Birmingham University and worked in the petroleum industry in Canada. He researched alternative systems of government at Imperial College, London. He emigrated to Australia and was employed in mining development. He became a high school teacher and wrote science textbooks published by the Queensland Department of Education.This book is his seventh novel published. He has been writing fiction novels full-time since 2013: speculative, love, politics, crime, sport, totalitarianism and satires. He is involved in public policy-making, has proposed an underground railway for Brisbane and a new paradigm for climate science. He discusses current issues at U3A and has studied philosophy with students at the University of Queensland.He writes letters, plays the guitar, sings badly and walks by the river. He is divorced with children and grandchildren.

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DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my family: Zoe, Tessa, Amani, Uly and Dorian, hoping that my writing will help them to respect, understand and conserve the World they will inherit, with care for living things, especially humans, animals and environments, through philosophies of freedom, voluntary responsibility, reason and science. I appreciate their support but opinions and any errors are my own.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to the following.

Donna Munro has looked after the formatting, cover design and publishing.

Miles Whiticker encouraged my idea to frame my investigation of river flooding within Heidegger’s philosophy of phenomenology.

The University of Queensland’s Student Philosophy Association’s Sam Adams led reading of Guy De Bord’s The Society of the Spectacle which was my background reading for understanding government of the Brisbane River.

The University of the Third Age’s discussion group Matter’s Arising, led by Garth Sherman and Leonard Evans, was a forum where group member’s ideas were shared and opinions aired.

Dave Jones, discussed some of the ideas and philosophies with me, between songs with our guitars.

Seville Road Writers Group led by Nancy Cox-Millner and Robyn Martin. provided me with feedback on my writing.

Sunnybank Hills Writers Group read my drafts carefully and critically, exploring my ideas.

GENRE

In his book Anti-memoirs, 1967, Andre’ Malraux wrote:

‘What is a man? A miserable pile of secrets.’

There are certain things people expect from reading a memoir and those often are not the same things I expect when I read an anti-memoir.  Memoir readers tend to expect a narrative arc, which goes more or less smoothly from A to B. On the way they expect to find something new, with a before and an after – an epiphany. My book doesn’t fit that mould. Real lives are lived more messily. My book has revelations throughout, more of lived experience than of character development.

This book is an anti-memoir, with the author’s recollections of living beside a river and people he could have met, with other luck, who are introduced to help him tell his story. I wrote my story not wanting to dwell on the question Who is the narrator? Because authenticity in many passages is derived from wide sources, rather than from the anti-memoirist’s narrowly lived experiences.

Anti-memoirs are books that ‘de-self’ the writer. In some places, I have taken myself out of it, while still having my protagonist use the first-person voice to relate the physical world, with contrived characters and faked conversations, without disclosing much about myself. This anti-memoir is more about the reader than the author and his associates. When you read it, hopefully you will think to yourself ‘That’s something I’ve thought, too’, or ‘That’s how I feel’, or ‘Now I know how I would feel if I had lived by that river.’

AUTHOR BIO

Martin Knox grew up on a farm in Somerset England. He graduated as a chemical engineer from Birmingham University and worked in the petroleum industry in Canada. He researched alternative systems of government at Imperial College, London. He emigrated to Australia and was employed in mining development. He became a high school teacher and wrote science textbooks published by the Queensland Department of Education.

This book is his seventh novel published. He has been writing fiction novels full-time since 2013: speculative, love, politics, crime, sport, totalitarianism and satires. He is involved in public policy-making, has proposed an underground railway for Brisbane and a new paradigm for climate science. He discusses current issues at U3A and has studied philosophy with students at the University of Queensland.

He writes letters, plays the guitar, sings badly and walks by the river.

He is divorced with children and grandchildren.

LIST OF NOVELS PUBLISHED

Available from Amazon in Australia, USA, UK and Canada

The Grass is Always Browner (2011)

Love Straddle (2014)

Presumed Dead (2018)

$hort of Love (2019)

Time is Gold (2020)

Animal Farm 2 (2021)

Turkeys not Bees (2022)

Brisbane River Anti-Memoir (2023)

GLOSSARY

(  ) reference listed at the end.

AEP Annual Exceedance Probability

AEP Annual exceedance probability

AHD Australian Height Datum

Aquaphile water-loving person

BCC Brisbane City Council

CBD City Business District

Cumec Cubic metres per second

Dasein existence ‘being there’

DFL Defined Flood Level

ENSO El Nino Southern Oscillation

Existential free and inherently responsible

Existentiell refers to the aspects of the world which are identifiable as particular delimited questions or issues,

Facticity the quality or condition of being fact.

Fallenness quality of being fallen or degraded.

FSL Full Supply Level

ML Megalitre

Ontical from the point of view of real existence.

Seqwater Southeast Queensland Water Authority.

Thrownness exposed to different life situations

CONTENTS

FIGURES AND PHOTOS

FIGURE      TITLE      PAGE

Fig 1      Figure 1. Map of Brisbane River Catchment.       86

Fig 2      Heights of Flood Peaks in Brisbane.      188

Fig 3      Brisbane Circle underground railway proposal.      254

PHOTO      CAPTION

1      Queen Street looking towards Petrie Bight during the 1893 floods in Brisbane.      2

2      We built a home beside the Logan River.                    10

3      We bathed in our swimming hole.      12

4      We sailed our trailer sloop in Moreton Bay.      28

5      Our house on Macleay Island in Moreton Bay.      30

6      Orleigh Park.      90

7      The author pointing to black mark from the

2011 flood peak. On the balcony apron.      101

8      Orleigh Park flooded taken from Unit 2 balcony

                    March 1st 2022      109

9      Atrium Apartments. Unit 2 is on the first floor

with Unit 4 above                                                        121

10      Dredge Woomera arrives in Gladstone, Queensland.      193

11      Orleigh Estate where homes were washed

away in 1893.       245

PROLOGUE

Howard was a colleague and friend of mine, when I worked at Wattle Mines. I had kept up with him since, playing tennis weekly. Like me, he was an engineer, interested in colonial history and public policy. He had written a history of mining in Queensland and I asked him to help me find information on the history of the Brisbane River for my anti-memoir.

‘When was the worst ever flood of the Brisbane River?’ I asked Howard.

‘There were bad floods in the 1840s,’ Howard said. ‘In 1891, when Brisbane had 100,000 inhabitants, the river rose to 5.33 metres. But a day of reckoning came in 1893. The Port Office gauge on January 29, 1893 reached 8.35 metres, the highest flood ever recorded, 3 metres above the 1890 levels, claiming four lives and leaving thousands homeless.’

I looked up the rainfall statistics.

‘Average annual rainfall in Brisbane was 1,100 millilitres,’ I said. ‘The total for 25 days in February 1893 was 1,000 millimetres, the wettest month on record. The mean values for January and February were 160 millimetres.

Howard said: ‘A landowner beside the upper Brisbane River recorded the impact.

‘(I) heard a tremendous roar like a train coming out of a tunnel [. . .] I looked up the river and saw a wall of water coming down 50 feet high, it struck the cliff and shook the house

[. . .] fully 300 yards back from the cliff.’

Henry Plantagenet Somerset. (1, p23)

‘Two weeks later, on 15th February the river level was back up to 8.09 metres,’ he said, continuing to read from his research notes. ‘It was a devastating disaster. Fifty people were drowned and many thousands were homeless.’

The central business district was flooded and rowboats plied on Queen Street, the main shopping street.

Queen Street looking towards Petrie Bight during the 1893 floods in Brisbane

(Sourced: John Oxley Library)

‘The weather was extraordinary,’ I said. ‘Two separate cyclones had delivered extremely heavy rain. Brisbane endured three floods, separated by just a few weeks. At Orleigh Parade, where I now live, an estimated 30 houses were completely washed away on Saturday 4th February, complete with all their contents.

‘Many of these houses, along with others being carried down the river, smashed against the pylons of Victoria Bridge, which eventually gave way with the northern half of the bridge collapsing,’ Howard said. ‘Many other buildings impacted the bows of ships moored along the river, with crunching heard across town.

‘According to one report, the houses destroyed were ‘particularly beautiful and costly residences. Just two weeks later, a further flood carried away more houses. Afterwards, not even the stumps remained. Only one house was left.’

‘Could a flood of that magnitude occur again?’ I asked.

‘Why not?’ Howard said.

‘They have built two dams to prevent it,’ I said defensively.

‘That could be wishful thinking,’ he said.

PART 1

WATERSIDE LIVING

CHAPTER 1 FIRST IMPRESSIONS

It was 1965 and I was 19 when I glimpsed a lifestyle I wanted and set a goal for my future. I was at Windermere in England’s Lake District, admiring waterfront mansions, luxurious amidst tranquil beauty. They contrasted with my childhood home on a farm in Somerset, by the sea, rustic and utilitarian.

‘How good it would be, after seeing the world, to retire from the fray to a place like this,’ I said to a student companion.

Exclusivity was a small part of it. I wanted to live beside water surrounded by wild hills.

In the years following, I emigrated to a job in Canada, travelled in Latin America, studied at London University and lived in Australia. My interest in living near water continued and I became keen on sailing.

I left the UK partly for adventure and partly from alienation by nanny state overreach, restricting opportunity for my engineering training.

‘The bureaucracy of collectivism is too limiting,’ I said. ‘I need freedom, competition and individualism.’

I walked ashore from the liner Australis in Sydney, with Carol, my Australian wife and our baby Sarah, in 1976, when I was 30. On the ship, immigration officials had indoctrinated us to get jobs, to buy a house, have barbecues, go to the beach and pay our taxes.

Carol’s parents collected us from the quay. As we drove along the highway north from Sydney, I was shocked by the dry conditions. When I turned on the TV at our overnight motel in Grafton, a small town, I was appalled to see a farmer shooting his emaciated livestock. It reminded me of photos from the liberation of Auschwitz.

‘The animals are starved and without water,’ I said to the receptionist. ‘Does this happen often?’

‘Almost every year,’ she said.

‘. . . several times usually,’ my father-in-law put in.

‘How do the farmers keep going?’

‘After rain, there’s food,’ he said. ‘The animals get fat and breed like crazy. They can’t be stopped.’

‘Aren’t there limits on numbers of farm animals?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Droughts cull the excess. Either that or they drown in floods.’

‘Overstocking, I call it. How cruel is that?’

I knew it was rude to criticize when you are a visitor, but the condition of the animals was shocking.

‘No-one likes it, but it’s nature’s way,’ said my father-in-law. ‘Don’t let it bother you, er, Chance.’

Chance is my name.

‘Why did they call you Chance?’ asked my mother-in-law.

‘My mother was sure she would have a girl. When I was born a boy, my father said it was chance. ‘It’s a name that will bring him good fortune,’ he said.

‘It’s worked for me so far,’ I said. I was usually optimistic and I appreciated that I had had many opportunities.

We drove on north, along the Pacific Highway.

‘Why are the highway and railway bridges constructed from timber?’ I asked.

‘Flood water comes up over the roads. Stone bridges would block water from flowing under them.’

It was hard to believe this dry country could ever have that much water on it.

Australian conditions were unlike those on my family’s farm in the UK. Within a short time of arriving in Australia, I had encountered drought, bushfires, cyclonic winds and temperatures in the 40s. But it was several years before I experienced flooding rains.

In the UK, the weather was more predictable. Farmers could usually count on raising and selling their animals and crops. The major variation was the amount of subsidy paid by the government. Returns in the UK were not large, but they were reliable.

Harsh conditions and disasters occurred in Brisbane infrequently. There had been a flood in Brisbane in 1974, but a few years later most people had forgotten it. The climate was usually congenial, allowing an outdoor lifestyle with wonderful parks, forests and the best beaches in the world.

For several years after we arrived, Queenslanders regaled us with stories of deadly snakes, poisonous insects and lethal fishes. We were hesitant to explore the bush at first, until we realised that scaring immigrants was part of the culture. Newcomers’ fears entertained the locals and the spinning of unlikely yarns was an art, called ‘rubbishing’.

Understandably, Australians styled their homeland as ‘the lucky country’. Extreme conditions were played down and adverse conditions could be avoided with forethought and precautions.

Today, after living in Brisbane for 46 years, my first impression of a harsh land has mellowed. There are hazards but much that is good. I am fortunate to live here. I haven’t suffered flooding of my home nor bushfires. My resilience has developed as I have gradually become habituated, by trial and error, facing catastrophes with a will to survive. When I arrived from England, in this dry land, I had no inkling of how riverside living would dominate the next 46 years of my journey through life, until today.

I had graduated from university as a chemical engineer. Later, I had spent four years as a research student in management science. My employers liked my curiosity and imagination and let me loose to explore whatever took my fancy so long as there was the prospect of developing a profitable project from it. My managers didn’t understand my skills but I gained a reputation for strategic analysis that they used to leverage their own promotions.

My bosses asked me to investigate ideas they had and my investigations would unfold opportunities.

‘If you don’t have the answer yet, you need to do more work,’ one said.

I explored at my own speed, until I arrived at actionable conclusions.

My analyses progressed from design of chemical plants, to coal export projects and alternative mining methods. As an analyst, I assumed freedom to investigate hallowed ground, confronting icons and promoting new ideas that were sometimes perceived as heresies. The company wanted a lackey, not a creative engineer like me. I made a break away and became a high school science teacher. I analysed teaching and learning methods, wrote student textbooks, developed online teaching and rationalised assessment methods.

My career teaching science succeeded in baffling school managers, because I wanted success for every student in my class, with lifelong learning. I liked to teach theories in the contexts of their discovery. I analysed relationships between ideas, developed hands on practical activities and set investigations that developed a love of science.

Since retirement I have been writing novels. I write stories about various fiction topics, applying a kaleidoscope of post-structural philosophical viewpoints, especially Heidegger’s existential phenomenology (4).

My work as a science teacher coincided with flooding of the Brisbane River in 2011. I investigated possible causes and mitigation methods, explaining to students what had been done and possible improvements that would reduce impacts. My interest developed into systematic exploration of the question students asked: Can flooding of the Brisbane River be prevented? The question was of most concern to those who lived beside the River, as I did. My findings are reported as a narrative in this book.

After the flood in 2022, my approach morphed into existential concern with how mechanisms for controlling floods, such as dams, could be influenced by political and technical leaders. The second part of this book looks behind the science method I used in the first part, analysing the potential of the Brisbane River by phenomenology. Responsible authorities could use my conclusions to develop technologies to reduce flooding of the Brisbane River.

Waterside living in a hot climate can have a cooling effect, but it can be offset by flooding peril. The extreme conditions can be manifest at the same time of year in Brisbane. They are opposed concerns, but individual experiences vary widely. I will attempt to find a balance in advantages and disadvantages of riverside living.

Many people are tempted to buy a home near a river. My experience could advise investment in waterside real estate. My philosophy accepts a remote possibility of disastrous flooding offset by near certainty of delightful living for decades.

CHAPTER 2: LOGAN RIVER

My perspective has changed since 46 years ago, when after emigrating from England my wife Carol and I looked for a place to live near my job in Brisbane. It was too far from the coast to live by the sea. My reflex was to search for a place to live near a river or lake. Living near water would mitigate the dry conditions, even if it meant commuting a distance between the city and waterside.

I was surprised how far I had to drive to reach a river. I had learned at school in England that Australia was the driest continent and oldest land mass, but the words did not communicate the reality of a land with rocky, leached soil and scorched vegetation. I had grown up beside the sea and the dryness of Australia came as a shock.

We built a home beside the Logan River

It was forty kilometres from Brisbane City centre, out through the sprawling suburbs into the dry bush, before we reached a place where we wanted to build a house. It was a hectare of land, with a swimming hole, overlooking the Logan River. 

We bought the land and with a builder planned our dream house. A year later we moved in. After living in a terraced house in northwest London, our new home in Australia was wonderfully natural, individual and private. Our house was huge and there was room for all our hobbies and projects. We had space, lots of it.

I was 32 and drove into the city to my job as an engineer, planning mines. I commuted 40 kilometres, about an hour each way, to work. To get more time with my family, I spent my weekend leisure time at home.

Carol started a speech therapy practice in the local town, leaving baby Sarah with a minder. A year later we had another baby, Michael. We led a happy family life beside the Logan River.

‘She’s a bonzer river,’ a local told us. ‘A self-cleaning swimming pool.’

We climbed down the riverbank with our children to swim together as a family. When they were older they enjoyed hours of unsupervised fun. On hot days, neighbours came and bathed in our pool, by a house-sized outcrop of sandstone in the river bed, with water sweeping over it, scouring out a swimming hole metres deep. There was a natural cave of sandstone.

Taoists liken the gentle dance of water flowing through a serene river, to learning from past mistakes, with the profound wisdom that echoes through the ages, guiding us towards harmony and enlightenment. It was timeless and wonderfully peaceful.

On hot lazy afternoons, it was a great place to cool down, relax and talk.

‘I wonder what the poor people are doing,’ I said, immersed with the current gently caressing me.

‘This place is alright, Chance,’ a neighbour said. ‘People have been coming here for 50,000 years.’

‘Where did they live?’ I asked.

‘Holes in the riverbank, in thatched shelters,’ he said, ‘I reckon.’

We bathed in our swimming hole.

In Australia, prehistory, flora and fauna are not widely known, as they are in the UK. Apart from rock paintings and a few artefacts, the past was unrecorded and oral traditions were disappearing. Little was known of indigenous living before Europeans arrived in 1788. Because indigenous input was unavailable, inexpert speculation served for history.

When more rain had fallen than could be absorbed by the soil, the run-off collected in freshwater habitats which enabled plants and animals to survive in moist conditions. Riverbanks, lakes, dams, lagoons, billabongs, swamps and creeks had plants and animals living more densely than away from water.

Most of the plants growing along permanent waterways needed the continual presence of moisture. On the other hand, vegetation that colonized shallow impermanent bodies of water had strategies to survive periods of dryness. Tubers and underground rhizomes provided a food store enabling long periods of dormancy, until water returned and growth recommenced.

Melaleucas along creeks and rivers grew to ten metres with weeping branches and red flower spikes like bottle brushes.

Casuarinas had male and female trees growing to twenty metres by the waterways, with slender, green to grey-green twigs bearing minute scale-like leaves in whorls. The fruit were woody cones of ten millimetres.

Wild animals living in the area were stressed from takeover of their habitats by humans, domestic animals and pets. At first, kangaroos came up to our house, but they soon disappeared.

There was stillness about the rock pool that transcended human affairs.

Here I had time to think about my job at Wattle Mines and how to meet my manager’s expectations. My assignment was to compare our company’s proposed coal mine for supply to a new power station, in competition with other mines. My evaluation concluded that we had an edge and should win a multibillion dollar supply contract.

‘We could lose,’ said Howard, a work colleague. ‘They will decide it by politics. Reasoning isn’t trusted in Australia.’

‘Why not?

‘People believe in leaders and parties, not ideas,’ he said. ‘Players won’t support your project unless it will win them votes and get them re-elected.’

‘It’s not democratic,’ I said. ‘The winning project should be the best, not a project promoted by a political party on the make.’

But he was right. The government decided the power station would be constructed near a mine in the Premier’s electorate. I was chagrined. It seemed like political corruption. I learned that in Queensland, government favour was needed to secure contracts. I was a planning engineer and it troubled me that my skills were superfluous.

‘We almost succeeded,’ my manager said. ‘We came close.’

‘It seems like a kick in the teeth,’ I said.

‘In many countries they don’t even have tendering.’

It was true. We had been able to tender in Queensland, whereas in the UK our farmland had been taken for a CEGB power station, without tender, or explanation.

‘Our government’s mantra is ‘Application equals tender,’ said Howard cynically. ‘Resources are allocated by favour, not by competition.’

Queensland’s Premier was Joh Bjelke-Peterson, who seemed intent on state development by government hegemony.

‘Politics here is different to the UK,’ I said. ‘Here graft makes the difference. Things get done. In the UK they don’t do much, except talk.’

‘The corruption here is more visible,’ said Howard, ‘because we don’t hide it.’

‘Is doing of favours, advantaging politicians, an accepted practice here?’ I asked.

‘When it’s out in the open, it is okay,’ said Howard. ‘Our local economy is too small to have market competition. Insider dealing can’t be avoided.’

Premier Joh alienated many people who wanted the government to be less self-interested.

At home, by the river, I had time to reflect and live in harmony with nature. In the summer we bathed in the river. Our children brought their friends there, climbing down the steep riverbank, to play for halcyon hours in the shallows under the trees. When they were young they skinny-dipped unselfconsciously and we trusted their innocence.

The act of daring to live by a river possibly developed certain of my senses with extreme sharpness, in a world with different signs where I could learn to live, talk and write, as a river person. I was inspired to begin writing letters and essays, learning to play classical guitar. I painted portraits, designed stained glass windows and made things from wood and metalwork.

The Logan River was a natural corridor for